


whether they saw heaven or land (the shipwrecked sailor remix)

by negativecosine



Category: Firefly, Star Trek (2009)
Genre: AU, Gen, M/M, Space Pirates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-22
Updated: 2011-04-22
Packaged: 2017-10-18 12:37:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/negativecosine/pseuds/negativecosine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bones stitches Jim up, mostly using stolen needles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	whether they saw heaven or land (the shipwrecked sailor remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gogollescent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Swashing Buckles, Righting Wrongs: From the Fabulous Adventures of Captain James Significant Pause Cook, A MUSICAL INTERLUDE!](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/3015) by gogollescent. 



_  
_

### _whether they saw heaven or whether they saw land  
their hearts were braver than lions_

 _  
_

 

Jim’s heart actually stops for nearly forty seconds. Just. Fails to beat. Those are the calmest, cleanest, most coordinated forty seconds of Bones’ sorry-ass life; his hands are steady, his breath is steady, he never wavers. He's got nothing to his name but his bones, his bones and muscle and breath and absolute perfect calm. Three of Jim's ribs break in the whole procedure, and Bones does not hesitate. He feels the crack under the heel his hands, but he knows how to do this. Twelve compressions, two breaths. Jim's lips are all dried blood and ice crystals and the crackled combination scrapes Bones' mouth, but after three repetitions of the whole sordid procedure Jim coughs twice, rolls towards Bones, and throws up on him.

Bones quietly thanks a god he has no illusions about, and digs out the foil blanket from his pack to wrap around the both of them until the crew gets their shit together to find them.

\-----------------------------

Three weeks ago, Kirk had been singing. Drunk, and singing, and his heart had been beating and his lips had been red and wet, not gray and cracked.

“Drink up me hearties, yo ho,” Kirk had sung.

“Fuck you,” Bones had told him. .

“You want?”

“I was speaking metaphorically.” When Bones had said this, he wasn't really a pirate.

\------------------------

Later, Leonard (Bones) forgets why this was a bad idea. No, he doesn't.

Later, Bones (Leonard) decides to be a pirate for real. Not just the pillaging (that was fun) and the drinking (that was weird) and the lawless justice (best; Jo sleeps in the bunk under his, now, and she snores like a freight train, like the best freight train in the world), but... no, it's mostly the pillaging/drinking/lawless-justice. But it's also accepting the lawlessjustice into the weird, twisted little crannies of your heart.

Or something.

Maybe it's a sickness. Maybe he's weak, got no moral fiber, or maybe he's lonely. Maybe Jim's contagious. Maybe they're both going crazy, and Jo's gonna catch it next, and the rest of this ragtag crew Jim's scraping together on his little stolen boat.

Maybe it's that Jim's pinned down with stitches (by hand, beautiful sutures, Bones should've been a seamstress, Bones really wants a newer goddamn med kit with a proper dermal regenerator but in the meantime he makes beautiful goddamned stitches) and plaster and gauze, and can't get up to do anything stupid, can't sing because it presses against his cracked ribs to breathe in too deep. Can't sit up when Bones slings one leg over him on the stolen bio-bed.

"Hi," Jim says, puffs a little weak breath onto Bones' mouth, which is right there. "C'n I have some rum?"

\-------------------------

They'd ended up on that godforsaken ball of ice thirty-nine days after setting to the skies in the stolen little firefly. It was a bad job all around; everyone knew Badger was no good, but Jim couldn't get jobs with no reputation, yet, could he. So he took a job with Badger, and Badger took Jim for a job.

“If we die,” Bones tells Jim as they're in freefall through the thin, freezing atmosphere, “I'm gonna have to kill you.” (Jo, thank g- thank goodness, is far away, holed up at a safehouse full of Jim's disreputable friends on a little moon near Orion, probably raising hell, bless her.) “And then I'm gonna resuscitate you. And then I'm gonna kill you again. And I'm gonna keep doing that, kill you once for every soul on board.”

“Cool,” says Jim. He's distracted, listening to Kaylee on the radio. She's claimed to be strapped down, but they both know she's lying, that she's crammed under the nacelles with a wrench in one hand and her other hand elbow-deep in the boat's guts. All Bones can hear from the speaker Jim's got pressed to one sweaty ear is a few words per sentence, a lot of “- overheat – don't know – she's – captain -”

And there's the bit that kind of breaks Bones' heart. This girl, she's sixteen, barely older than Jo, they were braiding each others' hair three days ago, and she's crammed under an engine shy of a third of the standard parts, promising this insane... kid, Jim's a _kid_ , he's barely twenty and she's got a huge crush on him and she calls him captain even though she might die because he's _insane_ , and that brings Bones back around to the matter of killing Jim.

“Bones,” Jim says suddenly, and Bones is startled out of a graphic and bloody fantasy. “We're not gonna die.” He's so intense, so damn sure, that for a second Bones believes him.

\-------------------------

Nobody dies. Or, Jim technically does, but Bones does exactly the opposite of what he said he did, because he may be a pirate but he's still mostly a doctor, and because he did the proper triage (Kaylee, miraculously, was almost totally sheltered from the impact where she was crammed into a small space between the fuel-tanks. The further miracle is that she didn't explode. Bones hugs her, hard and vicious, and his eyes sting, and he barely knows this girl, but he really wants to adopt her suddenly) and Jim won the “who's most fucked up” game and thus got the chest compressions and the breathing and all that fun stuff. They're off in the snow, thrown probably less than thirty feet, and the crew knows where they are, but Bones knows that they've got to get radios and coats and things to come out with the stretcher, and he knows that in the hip-high drift they've landed in it's gonna be hard getting back and forth. He expects to wait probably ten or twenty minutes for them to get everything sorted, which is more than long enough when you're in sub-zero in a light sweater and a thin foil sheet, but they're probably not gonna die of it before then.

The other weird thing, besides the adopting-urge thing and the brought-this-psychopath-back-to-life thing, is that the ship's almost completely unharmed. It - ( _she_ , Jim always insisted, _don't be rude_ ) - had been completely disabled by the magnetic interference from the cargo ship's unexpectedly robust defense system, but the fall was so short and so cushioned by the snow that the ship's going to be ready to take off within two days, once Kaylee and Scotty (also fine, also tucked into some cranny in the ship, Bones will never understand engineers, they're all indestructible, possibly) get a few things hooked back together. The emergency power's up, and it's enough to stitch Jim back together, and it's enough to lock the med bay doors when he gets up on the cot on top of Jim.

“No rum,” Bones tells him, first thing he says after that crash. His lungs feel cracked with cold, even though it's not freezing inside the ship. Jim's breath is hot and sour on his face, small puffs, and Jim groans a little.

“Why not?”

“Stitches,” Bones tells him. He runs his fingers light along a parallel line to the seam he's put in, just enough so Jim can feel it. “And you're on a lot of painkillers.”

“S'at why my head's all funny?” Jim tries to move his hand to- something. Reach up. Touch him. Bones won't have it. “Three of you. Boneses. S'Great.”

“Shut up, Jim.”

“Tol' you we wouldn't die.” He tries again, and Bones bats his hand away again. He gives up for a moment, goes limp and lets his eyes drop shut. “Didn't I. Really want some rum.”

“I don't think you even like rum.” Bones likes this, likes it way too much- being over Jim, feeling him all hot and weak and stupid right under him like this. “I think you like the idea of rum, because it's piratey and crap. I think you like margaritas.”

Jim moans, in a way that shouldn't be appropriate for either how fucked up on pills he is or the mention of margaritas. Bones pulls one of his eyelids open with his thumb, and Jim moans again and tries feebly to wriggle away. “Here's our big strong captain, then, huh? Our fearless leader. What the fuck are we doing out here, Jim? What're we doing getting you all cut open and banged up? Is this what you want?”

Jim stirs again, and lifts his head (with great effort) and opens his eyes (unfocused, but pretty clearly not concussed) and tilts his face so that the side of his nose rubs Bones' cheek. He pushes up, forward, until Bones has to stop him with a hand on his chest so he doesn't pull the stitches. “Bones,” he says, and his breath's so hot on Bones' ear, the side of his face, his neck, “You've known me... a month, yeah? So now you know everything there is to know about me. I've told you- everything, I think, pretty much. Of course this is fucking-- Bones. This is the only thing I've ever wanted. And, and it's everything you wanted, too, right? Got your kid, got plenty to do, got no rules, got a crazy bastard to bitch about, right? You're all set. We're set.”

**Author's Note:**

> Oh my gosh, this universe. I didn't manage to get as deep in as I wanted to, but I wanted to dig my claws into this AU and write like a thousand fics about it. Gogollescent, believe me, this is way, way shorter and less involved than I originally conceived-- time constraints, and whatnot-- but it was insanely fun to write.
> 
> (Unrelatedly: The title and tagline are from the Middle Egyptian text, Shipwrecked Sailor. I'm using a transcription of the Hieroglyphs out of the Hieratic before translating. It's not terribly important, that line just pleases me.)


End file.
